The present invention relates to a method of producing a visual summarization of text documents. More specifically, the present invention relates to a visual text analysis tool to aid users in analyzing a large collection of text documents. The location of critical information in a large collection of text documents, and/or gleaning of useful insights from such a collection, can be time consuming and laborious. An example of a large collection of text documents is a collection of emails.
To help cope with large collections of text documents, a number of tools have been developed to facilitate analysis. While many tools allow a user to run a simple text search through such a collection of documents, such a text search is of limited value in identifying, for example, patterns of appearances for particular terms. Further, data visualization tools have also been developed to facilitate data analysis but none facilitate a comprehensive analysis utilizing both meta data and data content.
The existing techniques are inadequate to support complex analyses required by many real-world applications. An example of a real-world application is a document review process that occurs during an investigation or discovery phase of litigation, where a reviewer may wish to analyze a large collection of documents to quickly and easily identify relevant documents to a particular issue or topic. The existing techniques are not practical because they do not provide the in-depth analysis required or are too time consuming.